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Mary Patricia Byrn and Jenni Vainik Ives have posted, ""Which Came First the Parent or the Child?" Rutgers Law Journal (forthcoming), on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

From the moment a child is born, she is a juridical person endowed with constitutional rights. A child’s parents, however, do not become legal parents until a state statute grants them the fundamental right to raise one’s child.
The state, therefore, exercises considerable power and discretion when
it drafts the parentage statutes that determine who becomes a legal parent.
This article asserts that the state, through its parens patriae power,
has a duty to act as an agent for children when it drafts its parentage
statutes. In particular, the state must adopt parentage statutes that
satisfy children’s fundamental right to legal parents at birth. This
right derives from the Substantive Due Process privacy right to form
intimate, familial relationships, as well as the right to intimate
association and ensures that a child may develop the parent-child relationships necessary to preserve her liberty, protect her rights, and define her identity.

To
guarantee children’s fundamental right to legal parents at birth,
states must reform their current parentage statutes. This article
argues that states must first
replace all presumptions in parentage statutes with clear
determinations of legal parentage at birth. Next, states must grant
legal parentage of children conceived through sexual reproduction to
the child’s
genetic parents. For children conceived through assisted reproductive
technology, states must grant legal parentage to the intended parents.
By adopting statutes that assign children parents from these respective
groups, states ensure that the persons who are most likely to act in
the child’s best interest become the child’s legal parents. In so doing, the state fulfills its parens patriae obligation to guarantee every child’s fundamental right to legal parents at birth.